Recipe Find: Tex-Mex lasagna a real crowd-pleaser

Updated 4:09 am, Monday, June 18, 2012

Who doesn't like a dish that's good for entertaining, tastes better when it's assembled a day in advance, and uses familiar ingredients?

Our find this week covers all those bases nicely, and it's all thanks to a request from Eleanor Castle.

She writes, “I have lost a real crowd pleaser of a recipe. I (hope) you may be able to help.

“I think I may have gotten this recipe from the Express-News in the 1980s or the 1990s. That's where almost all of my recipes come from, so there is a good chance I got this one from you.

“The recipe name is Green Chile Lasagna and one recipe makes enough to fill two oblong pans. I always made one to serve to my family and froze the other to keep on hand either for another family dinner or to take to a friend when she had a new baby or other family emergency.

“The recipe uses regular lasagna noodles, not tortillas, but then it has a (Tex-Mex) flavor from green chiles, ground beef and sour cream. There is a similar recipe that uses flour tortillas but it is not the right one.

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“Thank you.”

I can help Castle with her request, though I can't be sure that we ran this recipe in our newspaper previously. Our computer files only go back to about 1991 and it didn't show up in the search I conducted. And I've handled too many recipes in my past 30 years writing for the Express-News to recall many specific ones.

More Information

But, after searching through multiple community cookbooks, I found a recipe exactly as Castle described in an early H-E-B cookbook called “Texas Favorites: A Collection of Family Recipes” that was published in 1985. We may or may not have done a story on the book and published the recipe, but the timing is right, and likely this would have been the type of cookbook we would have written about. The book says these Texas favorites “were selected by a panel of judges and their task was not an easy one. We received hundreds of recipes” from customers and H-E-B partners. This recipe was submitted by Cheryl Thomas of Austin and just as Castle remembered, it makes two baking dishes of lasagna.